Virginia one hundred years ago

Visitors should be warned that several of the words, descriptions, and images from Harper's Weekly are considered racially offensive by today's standards. The materials are presented in order to give a true historical picture of the leading 19th-century newspaper's view of black Americans.

The author carries the readers back to the Old Dominion of a century ago, and gives a graphic picture of the pleasant side of plantation life at that period. The master and mistress and the little daughter, strolling leisurely along by the lowly quarters of "their people" are greeted with respectful affection as they pass.
All the accessories betoken an easy, comfortable, genial life. There is the large, old-fashioned mansion on the hill, with broad verandas shadowed by stately trees, where is dispensed the generous, free-hearted hospitality characteristic of Virginia country gentlemen of the olden time, while the faces of the slaves express content, and tell of kind treatment. The artist's happy faculty for the delineation of the droll phases of negro character is also strongly displayed in this picture. Nothing could be finer, in its way, than the group on the left, showing the contrast between the jolly, ragged field hands and the pampered, supercilious house servant who answers their ironical greeting with such disdain.